Wesley Snipes is arguably one of the most underrated black actors in films. The 55-year-old thespian has been working diligently in Hollywood for over 30 years. On Wednesday night (Aug. 9), during his appearance on Conan, he discussed his first big break — playing a gang member in Michael Jackson’s “Bad” short film in 1987.

Snipes confirmed that Prince was actually going to play the lead role in the Martin Scorsese-directed short film. But after the King of Pop met Snipes, he changed his mind and the rest, as they say, is history.

“Me and Prince were auditioning together, and I blew Prince out of the water,” Snipes explained. “Michael had told Prince that he had the role, and then he met me and kicked Prince to the curb. Imagine that.”

But as Billboard points out, Prince wasn’t onboard with Michael’s “Bad” song because of the suspect lyrics. In a 1997 interview with VH1, the late music icon stated, “The first line in that song is, ‘your butt is mine’ so I was saying, ‘Who gonna sing that to whom? Because you sure ain’t singing it to me, and I sure ain’t singing it to you.’ So right there we got a problem.”

The 18-minute “Bad” video, which you can watch below, features plenty of great choreography and MJ doing some mildly bad acting (excuse the pun). In a strange twist, Michael actually thought that Snipes was really a gang member.

“He really thought I was in a gang — he didn’t know that I was a trained thespian,” he told Conan and then joked, “At the time, the great Michael hadn’t spent very much time in the ‘hood.'”

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